Court-Side and Camera-Ready
The US Open is not just a tennis tournament. It is a full-blown style event where players, fans, and first-timers all show up with something to prove before a single ball is served.
What Dressing for the US Open Actually Looks Like
Walking into the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center for the first time, the range of outfits on display tells you everything about how tennis culture operates in 2024. Some fans arrive in fresh merch they have just purchased at on-site stands, tags still attached. Others lean into a Wimbledon-adjacent aesthetic so hard they show up in stilettos – at an outdoor stadium in August, in New York. Both choices are somehow completely correct.
The dress code, if you can call it that, runs from preppy polo tops and baseball caps to crisp white dresses and tennis bracelets catching afternoon light. Sporty and elegant have always coexisted here, but the gap between them is wide enough to fit an entire wardrobe philosophy. Naomi Osaka and Aryna Sabalenka were doing their part on the player side – both showing up in hooded capes and chunky jewelry, making the court itself feel like a runway. When the athletes are that intentional about how they look, fans tend to take the hint.
The fashion writer behind this particular experiment had two days at Arthur Ashe Stadium to work with. Her approach: matching sets, preppy accessories, and a recurring thread of tennis ball-inspired greens. Pinterest provided the initial direction. Zendaya’s Challengers press tour – one of the more talked-about style moments of the year – provided the aspiration. The execution, naturally, had to be practical enough to survive blazing sun and unpredictable New York rain.
That tension between looking put-together and actually surviving an outdoor sporting event in summer heat is where the interesting fashion decisions get made. A linen blazer is ideal until the humidity hits 80 percent. A tennis bracelet photographs beautifully until you need to dig through a bag for a MetroCard. The US Open makes those trade-offs feel worth it anyway.
Building the Looks, Day by Day
The first match-day outfit started with an invitation from Offline by Aerie, which shaped the entire direction of the look. A longline sports bra that read more like a crop top became the anchor piece, paired with flowy shorts that gestured toward the tennis skirt silhouette without committing to it entirely. The combination sat somewhere between athleisure and actual tennis-player-leaving-the-locker-room, which is exactly where a fan’s outfit should probably live.
Layering was the practical move that also turned out to be the stylistic one. A cropped white button-down added the preppy dimension and handled the weather shifts that come with watching outdoor tennis for hours. It is the kind of piece that reads as intentional from across a stadium but works just as hard as a sun shield when you are in an exposed upper section with no shade. Accessories came from the Offline and U.S. Tennis Association Foundation collaboration – a baseball cap – alongside a compact crossbody bag. Offline also produces a bag designed to look like a tennis skirt, which would have been the more on-theme choice, though the crossbody won on function.
Footwear was Nike Cortez sneakers in a limited-edition colorway. The Cortez has had a long cultural life – originally a running shoe from the early 1970s, it has cycled through athletic, streetwear, and retro-casual contexts across decades. At a tennis tournament, it lands in that comfortable zone between sporty and nostalgic, which suits the US Open’s atmosphere better than a more technical sneaker would.
The tennis ball green through both days of dressing was the most deliberate choice. It is specific enough to read as a reference without requiring a graphic tee or official merchandise to make the connection. Green in that particular shade – yellow-tinted, slightly neon in sunlight – communicates tennis immediately and also works as a color that photographs well in an outdoor stadium setting where backgrounds tend to be court blue or crowd-dark. That kind of contextual color thinking is what separates a great event outfit from one that looks fine in person but dies in photos.
Watch parties and stadium visits through the quarterfinals and beyond open up some variation in the formula. The matching set and preppy accessories approach translates well to a living room setup or a bar screening, where the athletic precision matters less and the general aesthetic – the cap, the greens, the tennis bracelet – carries the theme without requiring actual sneakers or functional crossbody logistics. The US Open’s spectator style has always been more about signaling an understanding of the event’s cultural weight than about dressing for physical activity.
Tennis as a Style Occasion
The US Open’s fashion moment exists at a specific intersection – it is a major international sporting event that also happens to have one of the most visually rich histories in sport, from the all-white rules at Wimbledon to the color and personality that players and fans bring to Flushing Meadows every September. Attending for the first time, with a fashion writer’s eye and a stylist’s deliberation, makes that history feel immediate rather than archival.
The Honey Deuce cocktail – the tournament’s signature drink, made with Grey Goose vodka, lemonade, and raspberry liqueur, garnished with honeydew melon balls – is already on the list of US Open firsts worth having. Whether the outfit standing next to it can hold up to the same standard is a different kind of pressure entirely. Aryna Sabalenka in a hooded cape is a hard benchmark.
